When Mr. Townlinson accompanied his visitor to her carriage with dignified politeness he felt somewhat like an elderly solicitor who had found himself drawn into the atmosphere of a sort of intensely modern fairy tale.  He saw two of his under clerks, with the impropriety of middle-class youth, looking out of an office window at the dark blue brougham and the tall young lady, whose beauty bloomed in the sunshine.  He did not, on the whole, wonder at, though he deplored, the conduct of the young men.  But they, of course, saw only what they colloquially described to each other as a “rippin’ handsome girl.”  They knew nothing of the interesting interview.

He himself returned to his private room in a musing mood and thought it all over, his mind dwelling on various features of the international situation, and more than once he said aloud: 

“Most remarkable.  Very remarkable, indeed.”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN

James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre—­fifteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan, “Jem Salter,” as his neighbours on the Western ranches had called him, the red-haired, second-class passenger of the Meridiana, sat in the great library of his desolate great house, and stared fixedly through the open window at the lovely land spread out before him.  From this particular window was to be seen one of the greatest views in England.  From the upper nurseries he had lived in as a child he had seen it every day from morning until night, and it had seemed to his young fancy to cover all the plains of the earth.  Surely the rest of the world, he had thought, could be but small—­though somewhere he knew there was London where the Queen lived, and in London were Buckingham Palace and St. James Palace and Kensington and the Tower, where heads had been chopped off; and the Horse Guards, where splendid, plumed soldiers rode forth glittering, with thrilling trumpets sounding as they moved.  These last he always remembered, because he had seen them, and once when he had walked in the park with his nurse there had been an excited stir in the Row, and people had crowded about a certain gate, through which an escorted carriage had been driven, and he had been made at once to take off his hat and stand bareheaded until it passed, because it was the Queen.  Somehow from that afternoon he dated the first presentation of certain vaguely miserable ideas.  Inquiries made of his attendant, when the cortege had swept by, had elicited the fact that the Royal Lady herself had children—­little boys who were princes and little girls who were princesses.  What curious and persistent child cross-examination on his part had drawn forth the fact that almost all the people who drove about and looked so happy and brilliant, were the fathers or mothers of little boys like, yet—­in some mysterious way—­unlike himself?  And in what manner had he gathered that he was different